End of the roses, Quaker meeting
A prose poem by Susan Vickerman
Her shadow on the carpet paler and paler, although no cloud has come over the sun; her hair thinner even than an hour ago when she was wheeled in. Although I did feel something coming over as I was arriving. It was the sky itself, a heavy silence, then this room inhaling and exhaling, this frail Quaker like a bird gone back to featherless or a fledgling still blinded by mucus, tiny lungs inflating and deflating under brittle chest-bones, tiny lungs of a little bald chick. The hour ticking towards its end.
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